The Harvard Business Review has an article by Richard Florida and Jim Goodnight called Managing for Creativity. It’s a longish explanation (and guide) on managing creative workers for maximum results, using the SAS Institute as an example. There are three basic principles:
Help employees do their best work by keeping them intellectually engaged and by removing distractions.
Make managers responsible for sparking creativity and eliminate arbitrary distinctions between “suits� and “creatives.�
Engage customers as creative partners so you can deliver superior products.
There are a bunch of other key motivators, such as challenging work, up to date tools, managers who can do/understand the work.
These ideas match what FCW discovered in its survey of the best & worst places to work in federal IT. Although no one agency stood out as the very best place to work, the top ranking agencies shared many qualities with each other and with SAS.
Freedom to innovate
Managers who understand IT
Great co-workers
Good training
Interesting work assignments.
Qualities that made a workers unhappy were bad managers, frequent reorganizations, threat of outsourcing, infighting, antiquated IT equipment and IT departments in disarray.
The one thing about federal employees that I didn’t see in the HBR article about SAS was the relevance of the work. "Our IT professionals understand and believe that what they do is important, that what they do individually really matters, that the missions they support matter to citizens, individual businesses and companies," said Tom Pyke, chief information officer at Commerce. Building better software at SAS obviously has its rewards, but it’s not as cool as working at NASA.
On the flip side, I don't know that government workers distain the difference between suits and creatives. Nor do they have a lot of contact with their customers. And they probably don't have as many gadgets and tools as their counterparts at SAS.
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